John Perkins is one of my heroes and I’m excited that he will be a speaker at Jubilee this year. He was a sharecropper’s son who grew up in Mississippi amidst dire poverty. His mother died when he was 7 months old and his father left him shortly after that. Although he dropped out of school in the third grade, Perkins eventually moved to California, got a very good job, married his wife (still married after 55 years!), had kids, a nice car, and a very nice house. Perkins was the incarnation of the American Dream. But then Perkins couldn’t get a single phrase out of his mind: “Success isn’t enough.” The thought was so penetrating that Perkins moved his family back to Mississippi to engage in civil rights activism. He was beaten and tortured on his way to becoming the “Father of Christian Community Development.”

I’m sure we will hear more about his powerful story at Jubilee. I can’t wait. But for now, I’m thinking about the same phrase: “success isn’t enough.” I remember having a similar thought when I started taking academics seriously from a Christian perspective. I was good at the college “game,” figuring out ways to get good grades by doing minimal work. Academic success, for me, was seeing my name on the Dean’s list showing others how bright I was.

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In his last Living Jubilee post my friend Sam Van Eman nicely ruminated on our all-too-human foible of thinking we can “go it alone.”  Specifically, Sam wondered about how to best improve in a skill or area of learning—a matter about which Christians who desire to serve God in their vocations, callings, and careers most obviously care.  If the God of the universe loves, calls, and sends us into our classrooms and workplaces to serve Him, well, we simply must do the requisite work to become excellent at our crafts, skills, and talents.  Speaking honestly about himself, he frankly wondered if it might be ignorance or arrogance that might cause us to think we can figure it out ourselves, doing before learning,  intuiting our way into vocational excellence.  He ended his honest bit of self-reflection with what is surely an invitation to all of us: “ I’m wondering if I could better reflect God’s ideal if I were to consider a bit of a change.”

What “bit of a change” might you consider to become more of what our Jubilee-bringing, creation-healing, Kingdom-building, God intends?  To be a Christian disciple, it is often said, is to be an apprentice to Jesus.  We who are Christians are first and foremost learners.  We are, as individuals and as members of local faith communities, being shaped and formed into the image of Christ.  We grow in maturity, wisdom, insight, grace, and courage—more fully human and more able to image the God in whose likeness we are made.  More like Christ Himself.

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Want to find out more about the Jubilee? Check out http://j2010.com!

I tend to fly solo. That means I think before I read what others think. I write before I learn how others write. And I do this because I’m convinced I know how something ought to be done, even though I really don’t know how it ought to be done.

So either I’m arrogant, ignorant, or brilliant. The last has been disproved plenty of times, so it’s got to be one or both of the other two. Maybe this observation is the reason for my reflection on Alissa Wilkinson’s recent post about working within a tradition.

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It’s the end of a decade, and so plenty of “best of the decade” lists are popping up alongside the usual “best of the year” lists. At the New York Times, A.O. Scott writes about the strange process of trying to narrow down the best movies of the decade.

At the beginning of this decade, I wasn’t much of a movie watcher. These days I am a working film critic. My list is obviously very incomplete, because I’ve grown into a more complete understanding of what it means to be a Christian and a movie watcher. (If that’s a topic that interests you, let me heartily recommend my friend Jeff Overstreet’s book, Through a Screen Darkly.)

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A couple weeks ago, I had the opportunity to go to Faith for Thought in State College, PA, and got to get some people signed up for Jubilee 2010. There were some great breakout and tactile sessions, but the reason I’m telling you about this great event after it’s over is because they put the audio of Byron Borger’s main session talk online, and I thought you would want to listen to it. Download it here.

Last week I visited STAND, a college fellowship group at California University of PA. Cal is small but CCO’s Pete Ware is a big presence on campus. As part of his effort to get students ready for Jubilee, he put together a four-week series on vocation and God’s call for faithfulness in all areas of life.

I had the group read Jesus’ famous neighbor story and then followed it up with a bit of Arts & Crafts. Paper and pencil to be exact, and a few minutes for them to insert their own future vocations into the Good Samaritan scene.

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I took my Mom to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Wednesday. Though she grew up three hours north of New York City and has lived upstate her whole life, she’d never been to the Met.

We went on the grand tour: through the Egyptian wing into the various European, Greco-Roman, and American wings (and all of their accompanying sculpture gardens), a pause in the Vermeer Milkmaid exhibit, and through the more exotic work of the African and Southern Pacific wings.

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